Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c22.37

c22.37

**Residential Schools or Vihāras.** The unit of the Buddhist educational system was thus this group of young Bhikkhus or monks living under the guardianship of a common teacher, the Upajjhāya or Āchāriya, who was individually responsible for their health and studies, manners and morals, their spiritual progress. We have already discussed the methods by which each such individual group or knot of a teacher and his pupils was organized, and the relations and regulations which obtained within the limits of each group. But these groups or schools were not always existing as isolated and independent units or institutions in the Buddhist world, as they did so largely in the Brahmanical world of culture. They federated themselves into a larger unit called the Vihāra or monastery. Thus we have to view them as parts of that larger organization and in their relations to its general, collective life which developed its own code of discipline and regulations binding upon all. While Brahmanical culture depended upon the system of individual schools and ideal successions of teachers and disciples, the Buddhist culture was the product of confederations of such schools in larger monastic institutions comprising numbers of teachers and students (sometimes as many as 10,000, as at Nālandā) promoting and partaking of a wider, collective, academic life with its own advantages as an educational and educative agency and factor. We shall now describe the rules and regulations governing this larger academic life of the monastery as a seat of education and a centre of culture of the times, that collective life in which the individual life of each educational group was merged.